I was in school when I got sick. I went from a’s and b’s to d’s and f’s. Now I can’t study anymore and I seem to have a loss of intelligence. Does anyone feel that they have lost intelligence due to schizophrenia?
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Yes I feel the same way.
ive always had some moments of the impossibility to understand some things. for some other things I was the best. I had good notes in school though. but now I feel also dumber, a lot dumber but I find also that schizophrenia is not just loss of the intelligence, its worse for me :/…
Yes I felt this too!
I find that staying healthy exercising and my concoction of multivitamins help!
It’s hard for me to tell if severe mental illness primarily caused a decline in intelligence, or merely accelerated a process of intellectual underachievement that had been the result of failure to acknowledge and deal with a learning difficulty.
I feel my IQ has diminished by some 20 points. I think it must be the drugs I take and the local environment. Could be the SZ itself.
Yeah, I also have the feeling im not as sharp as before the illness. Could be the illness itself, could be the meds, don’t know. Not really thinking about whether I’ve become brighter and what I took as sharpness were just misrepresentations of reality or whether I’ve really lost something important along the way helps. Just trying to get the most of what I currently have.
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My cognitive skills started going downhill at around 11. Before that I was considered “gifted”, later I was “forgotten”…
At 9 I was doing better than some boys who later went on to get scholarships. Then it was a case of gradual decline. There wasn’t much help for the highly intelligent but learning disabled(using US terms) in those days. No one,not even my parents made much of the relative decline. I guess some might have put it down to not trying. To some extent that might have been true or maybe subconsciously I realised it was going to take more than effort to get past the effects of the cognitive difficulties.
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I don’t think I have lost intelligence necessarily, but I’ve had decline in areas that would probably make me perform more poorly if I was in school. Things like motivation and concentration, and how fast I can process things. This may be the meds more than anything though, as I had taken a Wonderlic test for work while psychotic, before being medicated, and I scored as well as I had on the last time I had to take it, a year before the onset of psychosis.
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You’re not alone. 
but it isn’t so much my intelligence but more of my learning skills. I get so distracted easily now and I can’t focus as well as before.
I feel like I have gotten dumber. The worst was after the voices got so bad that I had to go to a mental hospital. Right afterward I feel like I would have trouble tying my shoes and holding a conversation. I worked my way back up from there though.
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I definitely took a hit when my symptoms flared up in my 20s. It suddenly felt like my brain was encased in cotton, and while I used to fly effortlessly to the correct conclusion, since then I’m just as likely to overshoot or stray off course entirely.
I haven’t been as sharp since, and as I didn’t seek treatment at the time, it definitely was not med related. Just a symptom of the illness.
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My information processing/mental speed is slow. I am not sure how much this is the by product of a learning difficulty or mental illness. I know that I am not good in taking in spoken information as it happens and prefer things written down so I can go over them in my own time.
Another area where I seem to have difficulty is with executive functioning NB organising and planning . Multi step tasks are problematic.
As I progressed through school I struggled more and more because of those things despite being regarded as highly intelligent.
Thankfully there is more realisation nowadays that high intelligence and a learning disability can go hand in hand. This means, so long as the problem is recognised, that there are more strategies to help the child/adult. Of course if you are above a certain age ie a child of the 60s and 70s or earlier it can be an uphill struggle to get that recognition.
Apart from social anxiety the main reason I haven’t taken up calls to go to college is because of those unrecognised cognitive difficulties… Difficulties that would set me up for disappointment and failure.
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